Laurie Graham Quotes

Sorry, I don't do castles. I hate those winding turret stairs.

AFTERNOON TEA---
GUIDELINES FOR YOUNG OFFICERS' WIVES
By Audrey J. Rudman

Use your loveliest tablecloth. Have fresh flowers on the table. In winter, candles may be lit. Colored candles are sometimes seen, but white are in better taste.
Offer small fancy cakes, plain cookies, and tiny sandwiches, with a choice of fillings. Meat paste or cucumber are always acceptable. The service of tea is presided over by the ranking officer's wife. The courtesy should be extended to the CO's wife, if she cares to pour.

I have a magpie mind, by which I mean I see and hear little things - photos, fragments of conversation - and store them away for future use.

I'm married to an American, and although we live in Europe, I think of myself as an honorary American.

In grief, after even the happiest of relationships, we go over things again and again.

My husband is leaving me. No dramas, no slammed doors - well, OK, a few slammed doors - and no suitcase in the hall, but there is another woman involved. Her name is Dementia.

Looking back don't interest me. Today's what matters. And tomorrow, if we're lucky.

As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.

The only people don't suffer those are the ones who never do anything

Personally, my interest in social history ends around 1959, by which time I was an adolescent. I've always attributed this to my particular sensibilities. I like formality and elegance, and I'm fundamentally conservative.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

There's something about Betty, like she's a great big empty space waiting to suck in trouble. There'll always be a story.... One of these days Betty's going to get up and find a line of starving Africans outside her door. You can depend on it.

I hate to think I ever make my husband frightened or unhappy, but I suspect I do.

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.

Sundown is often the worst time of day for people with dementia. They can become restless and difficult.

None of us wants to be reminded that dementia is random, relentless, and frighteningly common.

I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

I was fascinated by the culture clash between England and America in the 1950s. My first memories are of being a girl in those post-war years when things were really pretty grim. It wasn't like that in America, which was real boom time.

I think my mother was baffled by me. We were polar opposites. She was shy and retiring. I was over-fond of the limelight. Many times in my life, I was conscious of embarrassing her with my carrying on.

Once, every woman owned a small mirrored compact, and it was considered normal - sophisticated even - to flip it open to discreetly check for things like nose-glow or lipstick smudge.

I'm married to an American, so I guess that has changed my perspective on the subjects I can write about.

I have but one rule at my table. You may leave your cabbage, but you'll sit still and behave until I've eaten mine.

My mother was a fastidious and orderly homemaker. I was the messy but creative type. I picture her following behind me through life with a damp rag and an air of exasperation.

There is something very easy about women's friendships that you don't see as often with men. We all know examples of this, when women will just call each other up or drop a line, not with anything specific to say.

I'm thankful my parents obliged me to live with the unvarnished truth: I might not have been a looker, but I was a better speller than the prettiest girl in my class, and I was funnier, too.

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.

Audrey used to pass her some of her story books, but Gayle was no reader, not much or a homemaker neither, though Betty did try giving her a few lessons. I reckon Gayle lived on potato chips and Dr Pepper, and when Okey was home, they just lived on love.

I always complained about my mother's stony heart. Turns out I'm built just the same.

My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.

I've never minded solitude. For a writer, it's a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.

KATH PHARAOH'S WAY WITH EEL'S

The young ones are the best, before the turn yellow. Put them in a pillowcase with a handful of salt and swish that around in a tub of water till the sliminess is gone. Fry them in bacon fat. They're soon done. If you can't get elvers, then get an old boy, eight or nine years old. After you've skinned him, cut him into two-inch pieces and bake him on a grid. That needs a good hot flame. Nice with piccalilli.

In the Seventies, my children played in the street, read politically incorrect stories, ate home-cooked food and occasional junk and, yes, were sometimes smacked.

Caring burns a lot of fuel - psychological and physical, too, if any lifting is involved. The energy tank is soon emptied, and the toll caring takes is well documented. It's called carer burn-out.

With Alzheimer's, recent memory is affected first. At the start, you count the memory loss in days, then hours - then in minutes. But there's also an insidious backward creep of deterioration.

Even professional, paid carers aren't always models of saintly behaviour - and they know they can knock off at the end of their shift to go home, take an uninterrupted shower, and have a normal conversation with someone.

The terror dementia sufferers must feel is unimaginable, but the techniques they use to hide their difficulties - the ducking and diving and keeping the world laughing - are perfectly understandable.